What, if anything, are Jared Diamond's ideas worth?

[Raphael]

I've got the impression that our host has long been, or at least used to be, a big fan of Jared Diamond. Decades ago, on his recommendation, I myself read some of Diamond's books, and I liked them a lot.

Now, Diamond has long been critcized by many people, and I've long wondered what there might be to the criticisms. But most of those criticisms I've seen of him were variants of either "he's a bad person, so therefore his ideas are bad" or "his ideas are undesirable and therefore wrong." And neither of these sounds anything like a valid argument to me.

Frankly, I've long suspected that people hate him mainly because he doesn't fit into their political desires. His most famous book is probably Guns, Germs and Steel, which tries to explain why white Europeans ended up conquering most of the world. I suspect that the hostile reactions to him might be largely because

1) political right-wingers are committed to the idea that white Europeans and our descendants elsewhere ended up effectively ruling the world because we're generally superior to other people - "only the glorious master race could have conquered the world,"

and

2) political left-wingers are committed to the idea that white Europeans and our descendants elsewhere ended up effectively ruling the world because we're morally inferior to other people - "anyone could have conquered the world, but only white oppressors were evil enough to actually do it."

So general theories of human history that don't require white people to be either gods or monsters are seen as undesirable by everyone across the political spectrum.

But, that said, I recently saw a brief exchange in the responses to a Bluesky post by Bret Devereaux which made me rethink all this, because I generally have a lot of respect for Devereaux.

https://bsky.app/profile/thermidorereac ... vagsqdkc23

This reminds me of how Jared Diamond will sometimes escape confinement to historians who aren’t aware he’s just 1. Popularizing Alfred Crosby while 2. Occasionally mixing in his own, bad ideas.

https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux. ... vanfdxjc24

Indeed, although to be fair historians mostly dislike Jared Diamond's work.

A lot of us are so very, very tired of having to explain that Guns, Germs and Steel is not a significant work for specialists covering the 'Great Divergence' or particularly well respected.

For the record, Alfred Crosby's Wikipedia article is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_W._Crosby

So, what do you think?

For what it's worth, my own favorite part of Diamond's writings is not Guns, Germs and Steel, but The Third Chimpanzee (published as The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee in the UK), and specifically the chapter about genocide. It might be because I was an easily impressed teenager back when I first read it, but it completely blew my mind at the time. A kind of non-fiction version of one of those "novels that changed your life and the way you see the world" that people sometimes talk about. Ever since, I've been constantly on the lookout for anything that sounds like Us vs. Them thinking to me.

[zompist]

Bluesky posts (bleats?) are not an argument. But I was able to find a more substantial criticism of Diamond from Devereaux. (It happens to occur in a post on how accurate a computer game is.)

There is a massive amount of literature to explain what is sometimes called ‘the Great Divergence‘ (a term I am going to use here as valuable shorthand) between Europe and the rest of the world between 1500 and 1800. Of all of this, most readers are likely only to be familiar with one work, J. Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), which is unfortunate because Diamond’s model of geographic determinism is actually not terribly well regarded in the debate (although, to be fair, it is still better than some of the truly trash nationalistic nonsense that gets produced on this topic). Diamond asks the Great Divergence question with perhaps the least interesting framing: “Why Europe and not the New World?” and so we might as well get that question out of the way first.

I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event.

Which is a fair point. China could certainly have conquered the Incas just as surely as the Spanish did. I haven't read GGS in years, so I don't remember what he says about the Europe vs. China dynamic.

To me, Diamond is extremely valuable for conworlding— and so is Devereaux. When it comes to explaining development or lack of it, there is no unified consensus theory; you have to pick up what's useful from all over, and start to put them together yourself. (E.g. Diamond's discussion of what food crops are most useful is good to combine with James Scott's analysis of what crops states prefer and disprefer, and Bruce Trigger's discussion of which early states are more or less authoritarian.)

Diamond's sin is probably to try to explain too much, something which is always going to annoy specialists and really rile up the easily aggrieved. E.g. I just read a page (linked from Wikipedia) on criticisms of GGS, and one guy thinks that Diamond doesn't deal enough with inequality within society: there are poor Europeans, there are rich New Guineans. This is missing the forest for the trees— there is an obvious overall disparity between Europe and New Guinea, and that is worth explaining.

Another criticism was basically that Diamond's theory somehow lets Europeans (and Americans) off the hook— they can just say "we're luckier, too bad for the Africans." This is completely silly; an explanation is not a form of activism.

(I'm sure Devereaux's complaints are far better than these, but hopefully someday he'll document what they are. The above page is, so far as my Googling skills go, as close as he comes.)

[Ares Land]

Now, Diamond has long been critcized by many people, and I've long wondered what there might be to the criticisms. But most of those criticisms I've seen of him were variants of either "he's a bad person, so therefore his ideas are bad" or "his ideas are undesirable and therefore wrong." And neither of these sounds anything like a valid argument to me.

I liked Guns, Germs and Steel a lot, his other works, such as Collapse rather less.

It does seem difficult to figure out what the problem with GGS, which attracts a lot of the criticism, is. You get hints that it doesn't fit academic consensus, but I couldn't locate any of the actual issues people raised.
I think GGS might oversimplify matters; but then again, it's pop science.

[rotting bones]

Going by memory from years ago:

Academics say they are annoyed that Jared Diamond passes on myths and tropes about the colonial period without examining them critically based on the literature. For example, many of Jared Diamond's claims of indigenous mismanagement leading to environmental collapse are dubious. Western colonizers, slave raiders and introduced animals might have had a bigger impact on the fall of Easter Island. O'odham irrigation systems might have been destroyed by American water theft. And so on.

Geographic determinism is a very old theory going back to Egyptian times. It has some merit, but many other frameworks have been developed since then, including progressive ones like Marxist class analysis.

Non-Marxist progressives have said that Jared Diamond minimizes human agency. They say Westerners CHOSE to do the bad things they did. IIRC "Guns, Germs, and Steel" minimizes the effects of "Lawyers, Gods, and Money". They want to blame people who keep supporting these things despite knowing their bad effects.

On the right, Daron Acemoglu tried to show using econometry that when controlling for political institutions, the income disparity between nations at various latitudes disappears.

A good theorist would examine the claims of various explanatory frameworks and try to decide which one best fits the facts. A suggestion I have heard is Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History. I don't know whether it's progressive or regressive.

[Ares Land]

Academics say they are annoyed that Jared Diamond passes on myths and tropes about the colonial period without examining them critically based on the literature. For example, many of Jared Diamond's claims of indigenous mismanagement leading to environmental collapse are dubious. Western colonizers, slave raiders and introduced animals might have had a bigger impact on the fall of Easter Island. O'odham irrigation systems might have been destroyed by American water theft. And so on.

I did find Collapse a little dubious. The impression I had is that Diamond was setting out to create a sense of environment urgency, and then exaggerated historical / archeological records into cautionary tales.

Geographic determinism is a very old theory going back to Egyptian times. It has some merit, but many other frameworks have been developed since then, including progressive ones like Marxist class analysis.

Non-Marxist progressives have said that Jared Diamond minimizes human agency. They say Westerners CHOSE to do the bad things they did. IIRC "Guns, Germs, and Steel" minimizes the effects of "Lawyers, Gods, and Money". They want to blame people who keep supporting these things despite knowing their bad effects.

As I said before, I'm very suspicious of Marxist class analysis; I think it's barely adequate for 19thC London. I don't think it applies to any other historical period.

As for minimizing human agency, I think (as Raphael pointed out) it conflates historical causes and ethics (and even contemporary politics). The other problem is that it's besides the point. Of course people have agency and the Westerners chose to do what they did. The real question is why did they have the technology and resources to engage into large-scale massacre and colonization.
Another question is why did the West have such a surfeit of power-hungry psychopaths, and why were such people valued. I think the answer may lie in part with geographical determinism. I really don't remember if Diamond covered that.

[rotting bones]

As I said before, I'm very suspicious of Marxist class analysis; I think it's barely adequate for 19thC London. I don't think it applies to any other historical period.

I think Marxist class analysis explains a lot about history. It's because contemporary academics ignore it almost completely that I find almost everything they say unpersuasive. For example, I don't think Acemoglu's econometric analysis holds up at all once you account for the fact that some classes in society are necessarily small and can never scale under capitalism.

As for minimizing human agency, I think (as Raphael pointed out) it conflates historical causes and ethics (and even contemporary politics). The other problem is that it's besides the point. Of course people have agency and the Westerners chose to do what they did. The real question is why did they have the technology and resources to engage into large-scale massacre and colonization.

They are saying that capitalism is an engine built for mass wealth extraction and slaughter. This is a social system, not a geographic one.

Regarding capitalism, some people have suggested that when natives ask why foreigners have so much cargo, they are not asking how they got it. The natives are not stupid. The default assumption is that the foreigners are a numerous tribe who collected the materials and crafted the cargo somehow. The natives are familiar with crafting baskets and thatch roofs. They are asking why foreigners are guarding the cargo so jealously instead of treating the natives the way the natives treat each other, like friends. Why do foreigners behave as if they are at war with the natives by default without any slight having been given or received?

Another question is why did the West have such a surfeit of power-hungry psychopaths, and why were such people valued. I think the answer may lie in part with geographical determinism. I really don't remember if Diamond covered that.

This is the part they think is relevant to agency. Even back then, many people noticed that the natives were often nicer than the colonizers in many ways before they were brutally annihilated. These people kept journals that have survived. Nevertheless, they kept supporting the social systems that carried out the injustice. Therefore, they were evil people who just enjoyed doing bad things.

(For context, Columbus was like, "These Caribs give you anything you ask for. Fucking idiots. They don't even have any weapons. With 50 men, we can enslave the lot of them!" It's pure villain monologue.)

Personally, I'm a proponent of systems analysis and I think this approach is unhelpful in understanding the world. However, it could be funny if it helps wringing out some fascist tears.

[Ares Land]

I think Marxist class analysis explains a lot about history. It's because contemporary academics ignore it almost completely that I find almost everything they say unpersuasive. For example, I don't think Acemoglu's econometric analysis holds up at all once you account for the fact that some classes in society are necessarily small and can never scale under capitalism.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree!

As for minimizing human agency, I think (as Raphael pointed out) it conflates historical causes and ethics (and even contemporary politics). The other problem is that it's besides the point. Of course people have agency and the Westerners chose to do what they did. The real question is why did they have the technology and resources to engage into large-scale massacre and colonization.

They are saying that capitalism is an engine built for mass wealth extraction and slaughter. This is a social system, not a geographic one.

Oh, but the deeper question is why did capitalism arise where and when it did? And that may just be a product of geography.
I would add that it's not just capitalism; mass extraction and slaughter arose before capitalism (though it continued with it, of course) and of course capitalism is to a certain extent a product of colonial expansion.

Another question is why did the West have such a surfeit of power-hungry psychopaths, and why were such people valued. I think the answer may lie in part with geographical determinism. I really don't remember if Diamond covered that.

This is the part they think is relevant to agency. Even back then, many people noticed that the natives were often nicer than the colonizers in many ways before they were brutally annihilated. These people kept journals that have survived. Nevertheless, they kept supporting the social systems that carried out the injustice. Therefore, they were evil people who just enjoyed doing bad things.

(For context, Columbus was like, "These Caribs give you anything you ask for. Fucking idiots. They don't even have any weapons. With 50 men, we can enslave the lot of them!" It's pure villain monologue.)

Of course agency is relevant here. Of course the conquistadores had free will.
But I think this raises further questions: how come so many of them were sociopaths? Why were 16th century Spaniards so eager to place sociopaths in charge? I wonder if there's not some geographical determinism behind this.

[rotting bones]

Oh, but the deeper question is why did capitalism arise where and when it did? And that may just be a product of geography.
I would add that it's not just capitalism; mass extraction and slaughter arose before capitalism (though it continued with it, of course) and of course capitalism is to a certain extent a product of colonial expansion.

In Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, enslaving others through various means (including today's capitalist exploitation) and using their labor to live a life of luxury has been considered legitimate and an almost holy activity for a very long time. How this state of affairs came about is a long story. I'm partial to the summary given in Paul Cockshott's How the World Works: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HZRG0H ... p=drivesdk

Unfortunately, this book has almost as many problems as answers.

[rotting bones]

"anyone could have conquered the world, but only white oppressors were evil enough to actually do it."

Arabs tried to conquer the world and succeeded. The Japanese tried to conquer the world many times and failed every time.

[rotting bones]

I should clarify that I'm not against geographic determinism by any means. I think the world is a complex place and that many frameworks have valuable perspectives to offer, not just geographic determinism.

[Raphael]

Re: agency vs. determinism, I kind of think agency is about people wanting to do things, and determinism is about why people were or are able to do the things they want.

I do find it interesting, however, that the Left traditionally used to be very big on systemic explanations for everything, which are effectively a form of determinism, but many of them threw all of that out of the window when someone came up with a theory of history that they saw as removing the agency of people whom they see as villains.

Which is a fair point. China could certainly have conquered the Incas just as surely as the Spanish did. I haven't read GGS in years, so I don't remember what he says about the Europe vs. China dynamic.

His idea on that is that the greater geographic fragmentation of Europe led to more political competition to get ahead, as opposed to a unified empire that thought it didn't need anything from the rest of the world in China. Not really convincing, IMO, but only a fairly small part of GGS.

To me, Diamond is extremely valuable for conworlding— and so is Devereaux.

Well, if Devereaux is right, then Diamond isn't all that valuable for plausible conworlding.

"anyone could have conquered the world, but only white oppressors were evil enough to actually do it."

Arabs tried to conquer the world and succeeded. The Japanese tried to conquer the world many times and failed every time.

It has been a pet idea of mine for a while that the Muslim World during the Islamic Golden Age was basically the West of the Middle Ages. But of course neither political right-wingers nor political left-wingers are likely to agree with that idea any time soon. And since both of these groups of cultures combined amazing cultural, technological, scientific, artistic, and architectural achievements with unspeakably cruel, brutal, oppressive, and exploitative actions, you can easily make them look very different from another by talking only about the former when you talk about one of them and only about the latter when you talk about the other one.

[zompist]

Of course agency is relevant here. Of course the conquistadores had free will.
But I think this raises further questions: how come so many of them were sociopaths? Why were 16th century Spaniards so eager to place sociopaths in charge? I wonder if there's not some geographical determinism behind this.

That's an easy one: they'd just got done with seven centuries of fighting Muslims. When all you have is a Reconquista, every problem looks like it needs a Conquista.

Also, arguably societies do their best to put their power-hungry sociopaths on the frontier, or ideally in foreign countries.

[zompist]

In Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, enslaving others through various means (including today's capitalist exploitation) and using their labor to live a life of luxury has been considered legitimate and an almost holy activity for a very long time.

And India, and China, and the Arab world, and Africa, and Mesoamerica.

Europeans weren't worse people than other human beings. They just had better gear.

Now maybe with better gear people should act nicer, not meaner. Sure! But nicer ideologies are usually a result of people behaving so badly that their previous ideologies are completely discredited. It was European autocracy and exploitation that created European ideas of egalitaritarianism, democracy, and socialism.

[rotting bones]

Of course agency is relevant here. Of course the conquistadores had free will.
But I think this raises further questions: how come so many of them were sociopaths? Why were 16th century Spaniards so eager to place sociopaths in charge? I wonder if there's not some geographical determinism behind this.

That's an easy one: they'd just got done with seven centuries of fighting Muslims. When all you have is a Reconquista, every problem looks like it needs a Conquista.

Also, arguably societies do their best to put their power-hungry sociopaths on the frontier, or ideally in foreign countries.

Columbus was an Italian, not a Spaniard. I think European explorers were more interested in obtaining resources to fund wars with other European countries. (This was a proximate cause of what they were up to.)

Also, I feel like a lot of Europeans were in awe of the pomp and majesty of their monarchs back then. They really felt like the kings of Europe were chosen by the omnipotent ruler of the universe as vice-regents, much like Europeans later depicted savage tribes as being in awe of their chiefs, or like the far right is in awe of their moronic overlords today.

[rotting bones]

And India, and China, and the Arab world, and Africa, and Mesoamerica.

Smaller tribes usually behaved differently than people involved in systematic profit networks.

Non-Western civilizations had other ideologies: The caste system in India. The Confucian hierarchy in China. E.g. Under the caste system, the most important thing is doing the same thing as your parents, not ruling over others.

Capitalism and world conquest are not human universals.

[rotting bones]

I do find it interesting, however, that the Left traditionally used to be very big on systemic explanations for everything, which are effectively a form of determinism, but many of them threw all of that out of the window when someone came up with a theory of history that they saw as removing the agency of people whom they see as villains.

Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History which I mentioned before looks like a semi-Marxist work. (I just looked it up.) Looks like it was published before I was born.

It has been a pet idea of mine for a while that the Muslim World during the Islamic Golden Age was basically the West of the Middle Ages. But of course neither political right-wingers nor political left-wingers are likely to agree with that idea any time soon. And since both of these groups of cultures combined amazing cultural, technological, scientific, artistic, and architectural achievements with unspeakably cruel, brutal, oppressive, and exploitative actions, you can easily make them look very different from another by talking only about the former when you talk about one of them and only about the latter when you talk about the other one.

In The Last Ringbearer, the orcs are desert nomads who are the majority ethnic group in a technologically advanced civilization: https://dotat.at/tmp/LastRB.pdf

[Raphael]

And India, and China, and the Arab world, and Africa, and Mesoamerica.

Smaller tribes usually behaved differently than people involved in systematic profit networks.

Non-Western civilizations had other ideologies: The caste system in India. The Confucian hierarchy in China. E.g. Under the caste system, the most important thing is doing the same thing as your parents, not ruling over others.

Capitalism and world conquest are not human universals.

World conquest, at least in the sense of "trying to conquer the parts of the world that seem within your reach", existed for a long time before capitalism, practised by horse warrior aristocrats and the like. Enslaving others so that the people at the top can live lives of luxury on their backs is a good deal older than capitalism, too.

I'm not sure if the traditional Indian caste system really was/is all that different from pre-1789 Europe. The Europe of that day had nobles, peasants, merchants, and artisans. You were generally a noble if your parents had been nobles, a peasant or peasant's wife if your parents had been peasants, and an artisan or artisan's wife if your peasants had been artisans (I'm less sure about the merchants). And within the artisan class, men generally learned and practised the crafts that their fathers had practised before them. Back in the Middle Ages, parts of Europe even treated the hangmen, the professional executioners, as a kind of Untouchables caste.

[Ketsuban]

Columbus was an Italian, not a Spaniard.

Did "Italian" even exist as an identity at that time? Columbus was Genoese by birth, and Genoa was effectively a Spanish satellite; his expeditions were done in the name of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage was de facto a unification of Spain and made law at the start of the eighteenth century after the War of the Spanish Succession.

[Travis B.]

My thoughts on this is that the people who criticize GGS never come up with really good alternative explanations. They speak about how GGS denies 'agency', but they never come up with a good reason for why, as others in this thread have mentioned, so many sociopaths came from Europe in the first place. There has to be an underlying reason, and I refuse to believe that 'Europeans are just more evil' is an adequate one. To me there is no good reason to believe that any people is underlyingly any better or any worse than any other people. And, of course, this is the whole point of GGS -- trying to come up with a reason why Europeans conquered much of the world that does not require any people to be fundamentally superior or inferior to any other people, whether by being Übermenschen or by being monsters. And if Europeans really are more evil than other peoples, how do you then explain things like the crimes of the Aztec Empire, the Islamic world (remember that slavery was not exclusively practiced by Europeans by any means), or the Khmer Rouge, or Hutu Power?

[rotting bones]

Columbus was an Italian, not a Spaniard.

Did "Italian" even exist as an identity at that time? Columbus was Genoese by birth, and Genoa was effectively a Spanish satellite; his expeditions were done in the name of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage was de facto a unification of Spain and made law at the start of the eighteenth century after the War of the Spanish Succession.

Yes, Italian was a different language. Local identities were much stronger at the time. Italians were not involved in the Spanish reconquista, though the Genoese might have been involved in campaigns against Arabs in Sicily. I'm not sure.

Columbus went shopping around for a monarch who would fund his impossible expedition to "India". Spain was the only country backwards enough to think it's possible.